


Mother

by KissedByNightshade



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Family Bonding, Gen, Other, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-11 13:17:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11149215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KissedByNightshade/pseuds/KissedByNightshade
Summary: More than the stars in the sky or the voice behind your eyes, she is the one guiding you to where you belong.





	Mother

**Author's Note:**

> I wondered about the woman who ran away with her precious child, in spite of everything she’d been taught. Takes place in the game timeline, where Robin loses their memory. My Robin is nonbinary and uses they/them. 
> 
> Warning: contains physical assault that was actually fairly upsetting to write. Tread with caution.

You are eight when you hear him for the first time. Deep, guttural, his voice sounds as though someone had overlaid it on top of itself twice. It is only the middle of the night that he calls to you, and in spite of the howling of wind through sandstone corridors, you can hear his words perfectly. The same words, every time, in a language you can’t understand.

On nights when it happens, you wake up coated in sweat and darkness. The desert temple where you sleep, long since deserted, echoes with your waking gasps as you push away your blankets. Only the spiders and rodents accompany you as you wander from the prayer chambers you call your bedroom and watch the moon, shivering in your night shirt.

The temple sings to you as well, an eerie humming as the wind blows through the doors and windows. When you tell your mother about both of these things she looks alarmed, but she tells you nonetheless that it is only the wind whistling at you. You look at her with very big, very solemn eyes and you tell her you believe her.

When she looks at you, it doesn’t matter that the things she tells you aren’t true.

You are eight, but you don’t act it, she tells you sometimes. Life in the desert is hard, hard enough to kill a person, but the two of you make do. She casts spells with her own blood to draw up fresh water from deep in the earth. And you, skin brown as a beechnut, you find the edible plants and small fauna hiding under the scrubby brush and bring it home to boil.

You ask her about the magic, about the blood dropped into sand. “It’s dark magic, my sweet child,” she tells you, “of the most misunderstood kind.”

Another mother might tell you that eight is too young to learn of such things, but she only pulls off the purple satin from her hair and shows you the embroidered casting circles on its inside. “Much magic used in other places uses atmospheric energy,” she says. “The rushing of wind, the heat of the sun, the crashing of two clouds. But dark magic — it requires a sacrifice. It pulls strength from within the caster, or another source.” Her smile, which pulls at the edges of her eyes and causes them to crinkle, seems almost sad. “Some day, you will learn. But until then, you must grow strong, so that you never have to pull the life-force from another living being.”

You think about that for a long time, and you wonder, then, who first called it ‘dark’ magic, and why. But you are only eight, and you cannot divine a reason.

 

 

* * *

 

There’s a war going on, beyond your desert.

You don’t hear much of it, living as you do — just you and your mother. But word comes all the same. There are visitors, sometimes, other people who look like you, with dark skin and hair as silver as the moon. When they come, your mother sends you to your room, barring all questions, and only later does she bring you a small bowl of stew, after the visitors have retired for the night.

The war, your mother tells you, is between Plegia and a country called Ylisse, led by the high Exalt, whose dragonblood leads him against the Grimleal. “Are we Grimleal?” you ask, and she hesitates only a moment before nodding.

“…but you must decide for yourself,” she adds a moment later, after appearing lost in thought. “When you are older, and understand what it means to believe.”

You don’t understand what it means to have a dragon’s blood, only that it must make one more powerful than one person can withstand. And since you don’t know what it is the Grimleal believe, you go back to eating your stew in silence.

Sometimes, though, the visitors look very different — you imagine they must be cooked alive in their armor, their massive war-horses struggling to stay upright on the dunes. You’ve watched dark knights cross the sands on their graceful Plegian steeds, and these look nothing like that. These are the kind of horses, and the kind of men, who could trample a child like yourself without glancing down.

You would watch longer, but each time, your mother pulls you away from the window, and the two of you steal into the catacombs of the temple, usually off-limits to your wanderings. You crouch among dusty scrolls and tomes, waiting for night to fall to peer out across the wastes in hopes that the Ylisseans are gone.

“Robin,” she tells you one day, her eyes never leaving the banners bearing the brand of the Exalt as the war train slowly marches toward the horizon. “Given the choice, you must always let the Ylisseans capture you, rather than Plegians. There is danger for you in both places, but I fled with you for a reason.”

When you are twelve, you ask what the mark on the back of your hand means. It is the one thing she doesn’t tell you.

 

 

* * *

 

By the time you are seventeen, the war is long since over. Your hair grows past your shoulders, as white as your mother’s. She asks you, gently, if you’d like to cut it, or if you’d rather her make you a veil to cover it. You opt to chop it at the ears, and she cards her hand through the fine, wispy strands left atop your head.

The tiny border village where you’ve made your home isn’t even big enough to have its own temple, so your mother covers her face and offers her services as a priestess. It’s the only thing she can do, the only skill she was ever taught. There’s no one to pay her, but the villagers are gracious and kind, and the game you spend your days hunting is enough to make ends meet. You survive, and you blend in.

In the hinterlands, these scrubby deserts between Ylisse and Plegia, you see something new, something you’d never seen growing up alone in the desert: children. Children your age, and children much younger; children that look like you, and children that don’t. They play all together as one, and the sun burns the lighter ones as red as rust. You, who have not grown up with them, you do not join them, but you watch from a distance, and you wonder what it must be like to have such friends as these.

You sit at your kitchen table one day and confess to your mother that you don’t think you’re a man or a woman, but something in between that is both and neither. She smiles at you then, running a slowly-withering hand along your cheek, wiry from your years in the desert. “I always knew,” she tells you, and even if this too is false, you believe her.

 

 

* * *

 

When you are twenty, your mother tells you what your mark means.

“Make your choice, my dear Robin,” she says. You sink to the sandy ground, clutching the hand to your chest as if it burns. She sinks down with you, pressing your forehead to her lips. “You were born to be Grima’s vessel… but it must be your choice. That is the peace I have won you. The freedom to choose.”

You stare into her face and notice, for the first time, how sad she looks, her eyes wrinkled with age and sun and love — love for you. Tendrils of her white hair are loose around her head-wrap. She has aged alongside you, even faster than you, and she is far too old to leave this village now.

“I–” You look around frantically. Your village, oblivious outside these walls, carries on. You know what the fell dragon’s return will mean for them. You know what he intends. “I can’t do it. I don’t– I don’t want that.”

She nods and gets up. “Then I have your other choice.”

The garment she hands you — it’s something you haven’t seen before. A beautiful cloak, long enough to cover your knees, in black and purple and gold. Plegian colors. On its inner layer, you trace familiar fabrics; you can see  your favorites from your mother’s head-scarves — the one with spells embroidered into it, but also one with the outlines of the constellations in gold, and one with a needlepoint design of two dragons, one gold and one deep purple, locked in the embrace of combat. She’s made them a part of her second greatest gift to you.

“When you go to Ylisse,” she says, holding it out to you, “you should go to Exalt Emmeryn. She… she is reasonable. She will listen to you. And you will be safe there.”

Her kiss burns in your forehead as she sends you off. “Exalt Emmeryn,” she reminds you a final time. “Exalt Emmeryn, or Prince Chrom.”

 

 

* * *

 

The border dunes have receded into grasslands, and the fire of a distant village dots the horizon when it happens.

The world around you goes silent, if only for a split second, and suddenly he is standing there. _You_ are standing there, amongst the knee-high grass, and you see yourself, and you know that your other self is certainly not yourself.

And Grima, the fell dragon, sees you as well. His eyes — _your_ eyes — open wide, and he grins with your mouth. “What luck,” the voice from your dreams says. “A journey across time and space, and here is my prey, right before me.”

You run. But it is not fast enough, and not far enough, and faster than you thought possible he is upon you, and the pain of his hand on your forehead nearly blinds you.

And then you are on the ground, and the sun above you is brighter than anything you’ve ever seen before. Brighter, even than the figure that crouches over you — and as you watch, his cheeks unravel as if sliced with a scalpel to form four more eyes, arranged precisely like the mark on the back of your hand.

You’ve failed. You’ve failed, and you are going to die.

You see fangs as he grits his teeth. How very _human_ of him. You aren’t moving, but neither is he, and you see a wisp of smoke from his hand, as though touching you burned him in return.

“You fool,” he rasps, and your mouth falls open as you try to move, to speak, to do something, anything. “Don’t you see? Accepting this — accepting _me_ — is the only way for you to survive. Otherwise you’ll perish with the rest… ah, but perhaps I can still make use of you. Even if you’re not strong enough to carry me yet.”

He’s smiling again, and pain lances through your head as he presses a thumb to the spot just between your eyebrows, just where your mother had kissed you. “Best you forget all of this until we meet again,” Grima tells you, before standing up and pulling your selfsame cloak around his shoulders, the one your mother made for you. “No need for… unnecessary consequences.”

 _Exalt Emmeryn_ , you think as light and sound and time and space collapse before you. _I must tell Prince Chrom. Mother… help me._

 

 

* * *

 

Chrom’s hand on your shoulder is what wakes you, not his voice. He rocks you back and forth, not too jarring but distracting nonetheless. You are twenty-four, and it is very, very late. You curse yourself for waking him with your restlessness.

“Are you okay?” Chrom says. His voice sounds groggy, and you see his bare chest shift out from underneath the blanket. “You were calling my name in your sleep.”

At the edge of your consciousness is the painful thing, the thing you’re not sure you want to remember. Unconsciously, you trace the mark on the back of your hand as if an open wound.

“I think I remembered something,” you say at last. A thumb wipes at a stream of tears on your cheek. “I think it was my mother.”


End file.
